Friday, 28 March 2014

For my present to Jeff, I approached local artist Sarah from Popcorn Blue (I bought a print from her at a design market) to draw us... as animals. Jeff gets to be a dapper meerkat, and I am a pardalote (a cool little bird). Sarah draws a lot of animals, but she was keen to try whatever I suggested.

Our bear, The Oxford Bear, is in the picture too, ready to join us on honeymoon.

Sarah drew this in Prismacolor pencils. I use them too, but I don't get the results she does.

Have a look at Popcorn Blue's site, lots of interesting prints to buy, and you'll find out where she's exhibiting next.

Check this gorgeous necklace... A silver ring pendant, stamped with a latitude and longitude. What do the numbers lead to? It's 37° 43' 32.6" S 145° 16' 43.9" E , so work that out.

This necklace was made by the creative and talented Jason Moss from Sydney. We had him make some replacement wedding rings for us. Then we found the lost ring, but we liked the design of the new ones so much we went ahead with them. He does cool and quirky stuff, you really must see his web site.

Very thoughtfully, Messina have opened a gelato shop a short walk from work. Jeff and I took he air at lunch time and had tasty sushi at Pabu, followed by gelato. This cup contains fig with panna cotta, and giandjua. Mmm. The other cup had pistachio, and salted caramel. Read Messina's blog for an excellent article on pistachio.

Happy anniversary to Jeff and me! It's been twenty years. We're having an awesome holiday next month, so the anniversary day itself turned out to be a work day. Jeff made these splendid yo yos, and we shared them with the team at work.

Sunday, 23 March 2014

Oh, did I mention, after we had that nice tasting plate of ice creams, we followed it up with a second go!

Here we have - cookies and cream (yum), peach and mango (fabulous), lemon myrtle sorbet (I'm going to dream about that one), honeycomb (nice), fig and fennel (oh my goodness yum!), vanilla bean (gorgeous) and finally chocolate brownie- which, on any other day would have been amazing, but in this company was just very nice.

It's ice cream festival time at the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie. We enjoyed the Hot Chocolate festival last year, and used it as an excuse for driving lessons for Catriona. Well, she's close to winning her licence, and the boys haven't started learning yet ... So no special excuses for a drive.

We decided our TWENTIETH wedding anniversary, coming up in a few days, was a perfectly great excuse.

Here we see a "flight" of seven flavours to enjoy. Some highlights here - the pale pink is Moscato Sorbet. Wow, that's a fabulous sorbet. Smooth and alcoholic, quite a flavour punch. The one at the bottom with chocolate on top is espresso. We instinctively left this one for last, it was real coffee. The green one is mint Choc chip - fabulous of course, but a bit too strong in the mint today. Chocolate honeycomb with lavender in the middle was... perhaps not for me. Berry sorbet, the dark pink. Very nice indeed. We had rum and raisin - very rummy indeed. With that and the moscato, you need to make sure the driver doesn't have too much! Finally there was crunchy donuts. No, I don't know what I was expecting from that flavour. It was celebrating the crunchy sugar on top of donuts I think!

How cool is this presentation! A flight of seven ice creams is $12, quite a treat. The ice cream festival goes on until the end of the month.

Monday, 10 March 2014

Just tidying the desk. I seem to have this many pencil sharpeners. A couple are specialised. There are some for extra fat pencils, some for medium pencils, plenty for skinny pencils. Two are battery operated. Some store the shavings neatly. One looks like a Tupperware cup. They are pretty nice, but it may just be that we have TOO many now.